Advent is ‘a healing memory’: Archbishop Miller

A fellow priest with whom I lived and taught for many years always used to remind us at the beginning of Advent that Christmas “comes at the worst time of year.” We have shopping, writing Christmas greetings, putting up decorations, and endless social gatherings. Although it is supposed to be the season of “waiting” and “preparation,” we are mostly spinning our wheels frantically just trying to keep afloat.

We usually slide by the season and make it into a mini-Christmas. Indeed, Christmas carols have already been serenading us for weeks. The time before Christmas that the Church so carefully puts aside as a special liturgical season is absorbed into the feast that follows.

Even if we lament the so-called “over-commercialization” of Christmas, a point fairly taken, we can still look at Advent as a great blessing for us and even for a seemingly indifferent world. Despite its being ignored or absorbed by Christmas, Advent is still a time when forces of kindness and generosity are mobilized, and we should rejoice at that.

The very fact that people feel something different or special at this time of year is a cause for rejoicing. In the words of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional hope within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors to hope.”

But how should we celebrate Advent? We do so as a four-week preparation for the coming of the Lord. First, at his Second Coming, which is emphasized in the early weeks. Originally, in fact, Advent was held to be primarily a period of getting ready to greet the Lord when he comes in glory at the end of the ages. Second, of course, and what is more to the forefront, is Advent as a preparation for our celebration of the Lord’s Birth at Christmas.

In the fifth century, St. Cyril of Alexandria distinguished the two “comings” of Jesus in this way:

“In his first coming he was wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger. In his Second Coming he is clothed with light as with a garment. In his first coming he bore the cross, despising its shame; he will come a second time in glory accompanied by the hosts of angels. It is not enough for us, then, to be content with his first coming; we must wait in hope of his Second Coming.”

Dear friends: May this Advent draw you ever closer to the Lord Jesus Christ, anticipating with hope his coming at the close of the ages, and celebrating with joy the staggering and wondrous mystery that the Word was made flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem.

+ J. Michael Miller, CSB
 Archbishop of Vancouver

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